R-O-S is for Religion On Sale

Someone quipped, exemplifying the way consumerism works, "Every Walmart manager knows that if your customers don't like your product, you don't change customers, you change the product." The manager, in humility and eagerness to please, does all the adapting. The fixed point is the customers' likes. And why not? Why should we have to buy a color or size or style or flavor we don't like? That makes pretty good sense in that area of life.

This is very different, though, from the Bible's messages in which the fixed point is God and His will, and on every page people are told they must change. To illustrate, compare Jesus Christ and Sam Walton. (They were in different fields of work, so comparing their approaches risks silliness, but it illuminates an important point.) Walton's approach is summarized in this text, quoted from a container sold in one of his stores. "Sam Walton knew how to listen to his customers and understood their needs, to give them a high quality product at a low price." There are four points here.

How does Jesus Christ's way of working compare? Jesus, too, listened to His "customers." At the base of the Mount of Transfiguration He listened to the anonymous father of the epileptic boy. Earlier, He had listened even to the Pharisees' criticism of His disciples for eating with unwashed hands. Examples abound; Jesus listened.

But, to the second point in Walton's epitaph, did Jesus "understand their needs"? Sure; it comes with divine omniscience. But, the first difference, He did not always agree with their sense of what their needs were. For example, Jesus' response to the silent plea of the paralytic's friends, the ones on the roof, to give him his legs, was initially to give him forgiveness instead, and only later to give him his legs, and then just to make a point. Again, when the crowds of John 6 seek Jesus looking for another free lunch, He rebukes them for foolishly fixating on the bread rather than on the miracle that manifested His divinity. And when they keep asking, Jesus with equal stubbornness insists that He is the bread of life and He will give them Himself, His flesh, and nothing less-which they reject.

WE SHALL RISE OUR LORD TO MEET TREADING DEATH BENEATH OUR FEET Seminex Resurrection banner, designed by Ann Brecke, Displayed at Robert Bertram's Memorial Service, March 22, 2003

A Walmart manager does not act so. The old retail slogan, that pre-dates consumerism, "The customer is always right," was used because the customer is not always right. The slogan's deliberate irony stresses to the retailer that it is more important to win the customer's good will than the argument; so do not argue, even if you are right. Thus the credo of the Walmart manager is to give people what they like. Jesus Christ does not always give people what they ask for. Sometimes He gives them more. And Jesus is willing to lose customers, if need be, rather than to change His wares.

St. Paul, too, knew what people wanted. But, more like Christ than Walton, gave them instead what they needed. "Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, an offense to the Jews and stupidity to Greeks." And in the heyday of the Roman Catholic church's retail phase, Friar Tetzel's marketing success suggests that he gave people what they wanted. Martin Luther gave people instead what they needed.

In this difference of practice, we find an initial diagnosis of the danger if we bring consumeristic thinking out of the store and into our spirituality. Accustomed to being heard and to having our wishes fulfilled by accommodating manufacturers and retailers, we might approach God in a similar posture, expecting our wishes to be the fixed point and God to respond accordingly. We might even call that God's love and grace, and praise Him for being so responsive. (True, this is something very like prayer, but it is not the same; this will be addressed later.)

Now let's advance the diagnosis of the problem. The power of purchasing is to "take one's business elsewhere," "to vote with one's feet," to buy from a different store that has products more to one's liking. This is what manufacturers and retailers fear, and their motivation to be responsive to customers' preferences. And fine that they are. Jesus Christ, however, having a different goal, operates differently. He is willing to lose customers rather than to give them only what they want, when He knows better what they need. And how will we worshippers respond, in whom consumeristic thinking has gone to our heads? Will we take our 'business" (worship) elsewhere, vote with our knees? We do, in a way that we ourselves may not perceive. Here the diagnosis becomes more dire.

For an explanation of how this happens, recall the cartoon of a young man in a book store, looking a bit frustrated, saying to the clerk, "Do you have any versions of the Bible without so many commandments?" The humor is the juxtaposition of his desire for ultimate truth, via the revealed Word, against his desire not to have to change or give up much for the sake of that truth. It is funny, rather than just odd, because we recognize ourselves. (I remember as a teenager once doing a biblical word study to find out how much I could do without technically disobeying.) In our lives the same juxtaposition draws no laughter because the second half of it is so sly.

My example of this is not short, but is also interesting for its own sake. Its culmination will be H. Richard Niebuhr's famous quip about "liberal theology." The 18th century Enlightenment grew suspicious of all claims to privileged knowledge, such as religion's claims to revealed (and therefore unimpeachable) knowledge. So it resolved to use God's great gift of clear thinking, to determine for itself what is true and what is not, subjecting even purported revelations to scrutiny. This philosophical sea-change in strategy for knowing what is true (epistemology) went hand-in-hand with another change. For in this new strategy, the human and her powers were lifted up as never before. No longer distrusting our own judgment in favor of God's, now humans would be the judge-if not of God Himself, at least of anything other humans said God said. In brief, people began to feel good about themselves. Rather than suspicious of our thinking as darkened by innate sin and even post-baptismally enduring flesh, we became confident of our reasoning. Religion, too, became more optimistic about humanity. Interest waned in the biblical focus on prevalent sin and desperately needed forgiveness. The focus shifted to further improving ourselves, who were already well made. Against this utterly unbiblical center Niebuhr leveled his clever critique, that the core message of liberal theology was that "a God without wrath brings a people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

For the present discussion, the point of this historical example is that liberal theology indeed "took its business elsewhere." Not that its subscribers believed they were turning to worship a different god, though they were proud that their description of the deity differed from their predecessors'. They knew that they were departing from the biblical description of God (Thomas Jefferson's bowdlerizing of the gospels, for example), but they thought this to God's honor, that God was better than the Bible described Him. The biblical God did not esteem humanity the way they felt was appropriate. So they moved over to another god, one less judgmental, more affirming.

Today, too, I have heard more than once-haven't you?-"If God would do such and so-well, I just couldn't worship a God like that." Refusal to worship an evil deity is respectable-but God is not evil, even if He does "such and so" that we find troubling. And how shall we resolve our troubledness? The faithful way is humility before God's thoughts that are higher than our thoughts, like the Pentagon chief who declined to criticize a diplomatic strategy saying, "That's way above my pay grade." A not faithful response is like "Camelot's" young Guenivere, who says petulantly to her patron saint that if she does not take better care of her she will "pray to someone else instead." Although, as with liberal theology, it may not be an outright forsaking of God for an idol, but a re-shaping of the object of our worship, retrofitting Him to satisfy our sensibilities.

Now comes the final diagnosis of this malady, "consumerism of the spirit." At the advanced stage unsatisfied people take their worship elsewhere. And in the ultimate stage comes God's poetic justice: He lets such people go. Just as Jesus did not compel people who were offended by Him to follow Him, so will God allow those who leave Him to do so permanently. (Jesus' depiction of this, as "outer darkness," and "unquenchable fire" are, it seems to me, milder than the awful truth, which is: being without God. I wonder if the Lord didn't use these descriptions of physical and social and emotional anguish because they are more arresting than talk of being without God, even though that is more horrible.)